How to Work Somatically with Your Client's Emotions

Emotional pain is often felt physically.

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“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.”

– Helen Keller

“Where do you feel that shame?” I asked.

I thought Belinda would be nonplussed. But she knew what I meant right away.

“I feel it right here,” she told me sadly, touching her hands to her belly. More of Belinda in a moment.

Embodied emotions

We listen to our clients, we talk with them; we ask them, of course, what they think and how they feel. It’s easy to assume that we’re dealing with just what’s inside their heads. What they think about.

This is the basis of the ‘talking therapies’.

And yet emotion isn’t just ‘in the head’. We experience our emotions viscerally in our bodies, too. What’s more, we all know this intuitively. It’s in the lexicon going way back. We talk of:

Gut feelings
Our hearts sinking
Butterflies in our stomachs
Lumps in our throats
Getting cold feet
Having the weight of the world on our shoulders
Feeling shivers down the spine.

We even call emotions ‘feelings’!

And yet psychotherapy often overlooks this somatic element to emotion. We tend to think of ‘mental health problems’, aka emotional problems, as ‘in the head’ – but of course, emotions are experienced in different parts of our bodies.

So it’s encouraging to see that embodied emotion has been studied.

Prefer to watch instead?

Glad (or sad) all over

In an online survey, 1,026 people reported where in their bodies they felt different emotions and states.¹ Emotions such as longing, sympathy, panic, happiness, and so on were mapped by the researchers, as you can see in this video. For example:

Happiness: Fills the whole body with feeling
Sadness: Felt in both the head and the heart
Pleasure: Experienced in the head and across much of the upper body
Despair: Mainly felt in the heart, but not in the head
Anxiety: Felt in the chest, stomach, and head
Mania (‘madness’): Felt strongly in the head but not elsewhere
Anger: Experienced in the head, chest, and hands (linked to motivation for action)
Love: Felt in a great deal of the body.

Purely head-based experiences were few. Examples include imagining, reasoning, reading, and remembering.

You might have noticed something here.

Sometimes it really is all in the head

Mania and ‘madness’/psychosis seem to have a disembodied element. They are mainly felt in the head but not so much elsewhere.

There’s some evidence that psychotic patients may have trouble with a sense of ‘body ownership’ and feel more disconnected from their bodies.²

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Psychotic patients have traditionally been encouraged to undertake embodied activities such as weaving.³ It may be that crafting and other embodied activities have an ‘anti-psychotic’ benefit as they are connecting the patient to the fuller context of their embodied existence. Just a thought.

Anyway, it’s curious how many of us seem to experience the same feelings in the same parts of our bodies. And that being ‘too much in your head’ seems to be a thing.

So how might we use this embodied aspect of emotion in therapy?

Step one: Ask where in the body they feel it

Belinda told me she felt ashamed whenever the topic of the past came up at work, not only when she was politely asked about her own past but even if someone was talking about their past. She told me she felt really ashamed if she was asked anything about herself.

“They all have college degrees and happy family lives. I never had any of that!”

Now we had already talked about her history and gotten a lot of great information about the problem itself and also how she wanted to feel instead, but I wanted to know something more.

“Where in your body do you feel that shame?”

I could see her look inward as she recalled the feeling. “Well… I feel it on my face, like a burning… and sort of on my torso here… and over my tummy.”

So now we were talking not just about something in her head, but something closer to the reality of what she felt.

Next I wanted to reframe that feeling a little.

Step two: Ask what colour it would be

Just as when we work with physical pain, we can ask our clients to tell us what colour the emotion or feeling might be.

I asked Belinda to close her eyes and imagine a situation in which she might typically get that feeling of sweeping shame, and observe where it was and its colour. Belinda told me it was “a deep red”. I asked her what the feeling was like, and she said it felt hot. By doing this I was achieving three things:

Showing her that she could bring the feeling on at will – with the implication that she could ‘turn it off’ too.
Helping her observe the emotion as though from the outside, or at least more objectively, by simply asking her to observe it in her body in her mind’s eye.
Giving the shame a colour as the first step to altering that colour – which would in turn alter the feeling. This leads us to…

Step three: Help your client alter the feeling

Emotions can be seen as signals. Anxiety helps us flee a threat. Anger helps us become stronger and braver. Depression signals to us that our life isn’t working the way we are living it right now, that we are not meeting our needs in balance. But it’s not that simple, as we all know.

We may need our emotions at least to some extent, but they can and do sometimes occur when they don’t need to. We become unreasonably angry and endanger others and ourselves; we become anxious about what we don’t in reality need to fear; or, as with Belinda, we feel protracted shame even when we’ve done no wrong. In such cases, we can seek to alter that feeling so that it no longer trips us up. A car alarm is a wonderful thing, but if it blares when it doesn’t need to, we need to reset it.

I asked Belinda during hypnosis to inwardly experience a situation in which someone she worked with asked her about her life. I asked her to notice where in the body the sudden shame feeling manifested (on her face, shoulders, and torso), to see the colour of it (red), to notice that feeling of heat.

I then got her to notice what happened when the colour started to fade to pink… then to blue, then green. She told me the shame feeling was diminishing. I then had her notice the hot feeling of shame cooling right down and then leaving her body as though filtering from her.

Then I asked her to notice the situation again but this time shame-free, just feeling a comfortable coolness in her body.

We followed this procedure over and over for 20 minutes until it felt entirely normal to discuss herself (or choose not to) and feel entirely no shame, just a calmness.

She reported back in a later session that the shame feelings weren’t bothering her anymore.

Now we did more than simply work somatically on the shame feeling, and we worked on memories to help untangle the past and its effects on her life now.

But in Belinda’s case the somatic work I just related did seem to be particularly powerful and healing.

As she described it to me,

“I now know the reality of the words ‘to hold your head up high’. It’s not just an idea anymore – it’s my reality.”

It’s always worth asking our clients where they feel their emotion: Where is it in the body? What colour would it have? And if it had a temperature, what would that be? Sometimes, when we help our clients change these ‘submodalities’ we can help them change the feelings.

It's always worth asking our clients: where in the body do they feel their emotion? What colour would it have, and what temperature? Sometimes, when we help our clients change these 'submodalities' we can help them change the feelings. Click to Tweet

Especially if they have given us little else to work with, this may be a way to help them rapidly.

Sometimes we change the mind by changing the body.

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About Mark Tyrrell

Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.

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